For Dea, Coding Is About Expressing Her Imagination

For Dea, Coding Is About Expressing Her Imagination

Dea is a 7-year-old from Newton, Massachusetts and one of our Featured Makers. We noticed that she was making some amazing coding projects in Tynker with beautiful hand-drawn animations, so we asked her some questions about her hobbies, how she uses Tynker, and why she loves coding.

What are your hobbies? When I’m not doing Tynker, I like to make poems and I like to play with my toys.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I have three options: I would want to be a doctor, an artist, or a vet.

How did you get introduced to coding? I first started when we were actually doing Tynker in my school and it was so fun, so then my dad downloaded it on my mom’s iPad and I work on many new projects.

Do you ever look at other projects in the Tynker community? Yes, and sometimes I get ideas for my own projects from them.

What’s your favorite project you’ve made? It’s called Panda Care.

What’s your favorite thing you can do with Tynker? My favorite feature is art and drawing.

Why do you like coding? Because I get to use my imagination.

You can play Dea’s projects, where she’ll teach you step-by-step how to draw Thea and Geronimo Stilton, two characters from a book she’s been reading!

Dea’s parents Spartak and Alida are very proud of their daughter’s creativity in coding. At first, they were uncertain about whether they were comfortable letting her use online coding sites. They want to be very careful about letting Dea use the Internet because there’s so much unsafe content and because they want her to spend her time productively.

But Alida says that she feels good about about Dea using Tynker: “What I like about Tynker is that, as a parent, I feel safe that my kid is in a program that is exactly for kids that she can play, she can use her imagination, she can learn new stuff. When [Dea] says, ‘I’m in Tynker,’ I know I feel safe. It’s the only thing we let her play on the computer.” Spartak says that Dea learning to code is incredibly exciting for him: “She has gone so far with coding. I love to see [her] working on these things. This is not just wasting her time. It is really good.”

Dea has completed so many coding courses that Spartak says he’s filled an entire wall in their house with coding certificates: “She was getting one certificate, then the other, then the other. We’ve filled the wall with certificates, because I print them out and I stick them on the wall.”

Thanks for talking to us, Dea! We loved seeing your beautiful drawings and programs in Tynker and are so excited to see what you’ll make next.